and now he's 6!

My oldest monkey turned 6yrs old yesterday.  It was a long, full, but fun day.  He got to open the gifts his two grandpa's had shipped to him (they both live long distance) before church.  Then we came home and let him open our gifts.  He had a friend come over to play for a couple of hours while the two youngest ones napped.  Then Grammy came over for dinner and cake.  It was a full day.

This year he asked for a transformers cake but as he has never even seen transformers nor does he have any of the toys I resisted and once my husband mentioned that a friend recently had a transformer cake at a party I did not attend with them I knew where it was coming from.  I try to urge him to carve his own little path and not copy others for the sake of going with the crowd so I asked him to pick a cake that HE wanted/would like.  A nascar race track.  Then he starts giving me details - it must have a pit and such.  I told him to draw me a picture.

So I had a tall order for this cake but really a track cake is pretty simple.  He had a track cake for his 4th birthday too but it wasn't an oval shape and was just small scale.

So I started by baking the cakes.  Which wouldn't come out of the pans.  So I had to literally scrape them out.  So I had to make new cakes.  This time I put parchment paper in the bottom of all the pans so there would be no risk of sticking.  This time they came out with no problem.  I will say though that I used a yellow cake recipe and added strawberries that I had pureed and it made the cake turn out more pound cake like.  Not sure why.  But now you know.  Then I sat in the silence on Saturday morning while my husband and children were have quality time at the McD's play area because I desperately needed some peace!  KOJ is awesome!  So I sat and worked on the details.

I colored the coconut green:

I scored the tootsie rolls to look like stacks of tires for the pit area:

I crushed up the cookie part of the oreos for the track "asphalt":

Then after the kids were in bed Saturday night I sat down with the strawberry cream cheese frosting I'd put together and the decorating elements and I created this:

The scale is totally off but my mom told me it would be going overboard to move the "fence" made of graham cracker pieces out towards the edge further. So I didn't.  But I really wanted to! lol

I found that set of stock car race cars at the store and I couldn't resist it for the top of the cake.  Monkey's reaction when I pulled the foil off was amazing.  He loved it but I think he was mostly excited about the cars on it. lol

Happy birthday baby boy!  I hope it was everything you hoped for and more!